According to his questionable memoirs (see discussion page
regarding "The Chancellor's Spy"), Stieber was born in Merseburg, Prussian
Saxony. His parents were Hypolith Stieber, a minor government
official who later entered the Lutheran ministry, and Daisy Cromwell, an
English noblewoman. He began studying German law at Friedrich
Wilhelm University in Berlin against the wishes of his father, who
desired a career for him in the Prussian Church. He
was then employed in 1841 in a criminal court. When his father
learned that he was studying law, he ended all funding towards his
education. In order to earn his tuition, young Stieber began
working for the Berlin police. Finding this much more exciting than
Law, he obtained a promotion to Inspector of Division IV, the
Criminal Division. After the Revolution of
1848, he was promoted by King Frederick William IV of
Prussia as chief of police. During the winter of 1850, he was
ordered to investigate an exiled political extremist named Karl Marx.

His dubious memoirs state that, posing as a doctor, he bluffed
his way into Marx's London
household and stole the membership listings of Marx's Communist
League. The information in the files was sent to France and
also to several German States. Many of Marx's associates were then
sentenced to long prison terms. [1]
Stieber's memoirs also describe his involvement with matters
embarrassing to the House of Hohenzollern. He refers
to an occasion when a Greek
swindler named Simonides bilked the Berlin Academy of Science out of 5,000 talers via a
forged Ancient
Greek manuscript. As the money had come from the king's private
purse, Stieber was ordered to get it back as discreetly as
possible. Using an elderly circus performer as an interpreter,
Stieber forced Simonides to return the money by threatening to hand
him over to the notoriously brutal Greek police. With the money
secured, Simonides was escorted to the border and ordered never to
return to Prussia. [2]

Stieber also investigated a counterfeiting gang in the Rhineland and insider trading
on the Berlin stock
exchange. He also became something of an expert on the
prostitution trade in Berlin and recruited many of its denizens as
informants.